He followed him until he reached a midship boat. He stood in the shelter of this and saw a steward come forward. The two men, dimly discerned under the yellow glow of the overhead deck-lights, were pointing toward a cabin door. Fay started with surprise. It was his own door!
The steward tried the brass-knob, rapped once, bent his head and listened with his left ear to the panel. He straightened and shook his head as the captain struck the tissue with impatient knuckles.
An oath in Norwegian rolled along the ship. Fay came out from the shadow of the boat and sauntered forward. He rounded the bay of the pilot-house and hurried aft without glancing back. He stood, finally, at the rail which overlooked the stern of the vessel.
His brain worked swiftly and toward one point. The captain had received a wireless message. The message concerned himself. For no other reason would the steward have knocked on the door of the cabin.
The context of this message might prove
embarrassing. Scotland Yard had a long arm. It had dragged him out of a Dartmoor cell. It had pressed him on in the mission to Holland. Now, perhaps, it was reaching again, and this time for revenge and deeper incarceration.
Fay smiled with thin bitterness. He was on the eve of a discovery. The captain might make an arrest at any moment. Visions of chains and “brigs� and well-guarded cabins came to him. He stared forward where he had last seen the captain.
The fog had been reached. It wreathed the ship in clammy folds. The spars, the rails, the outswung boats, the white life-preservers, were dripping with yellow drops. The siren blared its warning signal. The knife-like bow of the ship slit through the curtain like a sabre through cloth.
Hurtling onward, the ship seemed a shadow within a shadow. The hissing waves under the counter, the thrash of the single screw, the clank of shovels on the stoke-hold plates— heard through the ventilators—all drove a resolve within Fay’s breast. He cursed the day he had ever heard of the cipher or the cipher-key. He wanted freedom and a shielding distance away from the menacing hand of the Yard. He decided to crawl into a life-boat, draw the tarpaulin, and remain there until he could signal to Saidee Isaacs. He reached upward and lifted himself to the blocks of the after port boat whose davits were swung outboard.
The stiff canvas was laced by stout rope-yarn. It would have to be cut in order to lift a flap sufficiently large enough to crawl through. He reached for his